Jun 29, 2015

Birds and Butterflies Painting

In a previous post I showed how I painted a butterfly in Photoshop. Now it's time to display the finished painting with butterflies, birds, flowers, and all. The rest of the painting was created pretty much the same way as the butterfly, by layering and blending much as you would with real oil paints.

The main difference between most of the painting and the birds is the brushes. If you look at bird feathers closely you'll see that the finer body and head feathers actually have a texture much like soft fine fur. So I used Photoshop's bristle brushes to create the hair-like texture of these soft body feathers. It took a bit of experimenting with the brush's settings to get the look I wanted.

Here you can see a detail close-up of the resulting texture on the bluebird's throat feathers, and the icon showing the bristle brush used.